Maverick Philosopher

Jack Kerouac: Religious Writer?

Beatific October, Kerouac month hereabouts, is at its sad redbrick end once again, but I can't let her slip away without one more substantial Kerouac entry. So raise your glass with me on this eve of All Saint's Day as I say a prayer for Jack's soul which, I fear, is still in need of purgation before it is ready for the ultimate beat vision, the visio beata. We rest at the end  of the road, but don't assume that the road ends with death.

..........................

The Kerouac and Friends industry churns on, a recent product being Hard to be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats by Robert Inchausti, Shambhala (January 30, 2018), 208 pages.

From Scott Beauchamp's review:

The real tragedy of Kerouac’s reception was that the people who should have known better took the en vogue hedonist reading at face value, writing him off as a word-vomiting miscreant. But that’s a caricature of Kerouac that over-emphasizes the most obvious personal flaws of an intensely spiritual writer. It’s an oversimplification by way of calling someone a simpleton. The truth is more complex and so much more interesting: Kerouac was one of the most humble and devoted American religious writers of the 20th century. Robert Inchausti’s recently published Hard to be a Saint in the City: The Spiritual Vision of the Beats makes an attempt at recognizing the heterodox spiritual focus of the entire Beat oeuvre, but it only points the reader in the right direction. Its simple and hodgepodge construction suggests the vast amount of analysis, particularly of Kerouac’s work, which remains to be done in order to change his reputation in the popular imagination.

I'm a Kerouac aficionado from way back. I love the guy and the rush and gush of his hyper-romantic and heart-felt wordage.* He brings tears to my eyes every October. His tapes and CDs accompany me on every road trip. He was a writer who was religious, but a "religious writer"? It's an exaggeration, like calling Thomas Merton, who was a religious writer,  a spiritual master. I love him too, especially the Merton of the journals, all seven of which I have read and re-read, but he was no more a spiritual master than I am.  And then there is Bob Dylan, the greatest American writer of popular songs, who added so much to our lives, but deserving of the Nobel Prize in Literature?  We live in an age of exaggeration. I submit that Flannery O'Connor is closer to the truth about Kerouac & Co.

Flannery O'Connor, The Habit of Being (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1979), pp. 336-337, in a letter to Dr. T. R. Spivey dated 21 June 1959:

I haven't read the article in PR [Paris Review?] or the beat writers themselves.  That seems about the most appalling thing you could set yourself to do -- read them.  But reading about them and reading what they have to say about themselves makes me think that there is a lot of ill-directed good in them.  Certainly some revolt against our exaggerated materialism is long overdue.  They seem to know a good many of the right things to run away from, but to lack any necessary discipline.  They call themselves holy but holiness costs and so far as I can see they pay nothing.  It's true that grace is the free gift of God  but to put yourself in the way of being receptive to it you have to practice self-denial.  I observe that Baron von Hügel's most used words are derivatives of the word cost.  As long as the beat people abandon themselves to all sensual satisfactions, on principle, you can't take them for anything  but false mystics.  A good look at St. John of the Cross makes them all look sick.

You can't trust them as poets either because they are too busy acting like poets.  The true poet is anonymous, as to his habits, but these boys have to look, act, and apparently smell like poets.This is the only reference to the Beats that I found in The Habit of Being apart from the sentence, "That boy is on the road more than Kerouac, though in a more elegant manner." (p. 373)

Although O'Connor did not read the Beat authors  she correctly sensed their appalling side (William Burroughs, for one example) and zeroed in accurately on their lack of discipline and adolescent posturing as 'holy' when they refused to satisfy the elementary requirements of becoming such.  But in fairness to Kerouac one should point out that he really did at one time make a very serious effort at reforming his life. See Resolutions Made and Broken, No More Booze, Publishing, or Seminal Emission, Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac. 

And I wonder what Miss O'Connor would say had she lived long enough  to read that book by the Holy Goof, Neal Cassady, entitled Grace Beats Karma: Letters from Prison 1958-1960? (Blast Books, 1993)  Grace Beats Karma: what a wonderful  title, apt, witty, and pithy!  

Arguably, the central figure of the Beat movement was not Kerouac (OTR's Sal Paradise) but Neal Cassady (OTR's Dean Moriarty).

Lucky me, to have been both in and of the '60s. And to have survived.

_____________________

*'Wordage' to my ear embodies a sense between the pejorative 'verbiage'  and the commendatory 'writing.' I am reminded of Truman Capote's anti-Kerouac jab, "That's not writing; it's typewriting!" 

Addendum.  Vito Caiati writes,

I read with interest your post “Jack Kerouac, Religious Writer?” and it struck me that, with a bit of editing, Flannery O’Connor’s remark on “the true poet” might be applied to the too worldly Merton:  “The true monk is anonymous, as to his habits, but this boy has to look, act, and apparently smell like a monk” I feel that Merton’s superiors, who failed to check his wanderings of one kind or another, harmed his rich spiritual potential, which is most evident in the early journals. As the protagonist of Georges Bernanos’ Journal de un cure de la campagne observes,  when speaking of monks extra muros,  “Les moines sont d’incomparables maitres de la vie intérieur, . . . mais il en est de la plupart of ces fameux ‘traits’ comme des vins de terroir, qui doivent se consommer sur place. Ils ne supportent pas le voyage. ” Monks are incomparable masters of the interior life, . . . but most of these famous ‘traits’ [that they possess] like the terroir wines, must be consumed in place,  They do not support the trip.”

 

Vito,

 

Very good observation.

 

While deeply appreciative of monasticism with its contemptus mundi, Merton, desirous of name and fame, was wide open to the siren song of the world, which became irresistibly loud when the '60s came along. Had he been our age, would he have become a monk at all?  Had he lived beyond the age of 53, would he have remained a monk? 

 

I love his Journals. That is where you will find the real Merton.  As in Kerouac, a deep sincerity of the heart to break the heart.

 

I am familiar with Bernanos' The Diary of a Country Priest, which is both theologically penetrating and of high literary value. (I would not say that Kerouac's novels are of high literary value, but on the other hand, they are not trash like those of Bukowski.)

 

There are superb passages on prayer, sin, lust, and confession in Bernanos which I may post. 

 

But I haven't found the passage you cite. Where is it roughly? Near the beginning, middle, end?  I don't imagine you have an English trans.

 

It is always good to hear from you.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Route 66 and Kerouac's Favorite Song

Jack Kerouac in a letter from 17 January 1962: "Everybody is making money off my ideas, like those "Route 66" TV producers, everybody except me . . . ." (Selected Letters 1957-1969, ed. Charters, Viking 1999, p. 326; see also p. 461 and pp. 301-302.)  Here is the Nelson Riddle theme music from the TV series.  And here is part of an episode from the series which ran from 1960-1964.  George Maharis bears a striking resemblance to Jack, wouldn't you say? And notice Maharis is riding shotgun.  Kerouac wasn't a driver.  Neal Cassady was the driver.

Now dig Bobby Troup.  And if that's too cool for you, here is Depeche Mode.  Behind the Wheel for good photos of the Mother Road. Chuck Berry, the Rolling Stones, Dr. Feelgood,  and others such as Asleep at the Wheel have covered the tune.

Jack's Favorite Song

Ellis Amburn, Subterranean Kerouac (St. Martin's 1998), p. 324:

One night he [Kerouac, during a 1962 visit to Lowell, Mass.] left a bar called Chuck's with Huck Finneral, a reedy, behatted eccentric who carried a business card that read: "Professional killer . . . virgins fixed . . . orgies organized, dinosaurs neutered, contracts & leases broken." Huck's philosophy of life was: "Better a wise madness than a foolish sanity." They drove to a friend's house in Merrimack, New Hampshire, and on the way, Jack sang "Moon River," calling it his favorite song. Composed by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, "Moon River" was the theme song of the popular Audrey Hepburn movie Breakfast at Tiffany's. Sobbed by a harmonic, later swelling with strings and chorus, the plaintive tune's gentle but epic-like lyrics describe a dreamer and roamer not unlike Kerouac.

Indeed they do. A restless dreamer, a lonesome traveler, a dharma seeker, a desolation angel passing through this vale of tears and mist, a pilgrim on the via dolorosa of this dolorous life, a drifter on the river of samsara hoping one day to cross to the Far Shore. 

Another 'river' song in the same plaintive vein is Chase Webster's Moody River from 1961. It has been covered by such artists as Pat Boone, John Fogerty, and Doc Watson.

Are You a Gray Man?

Substack latest.

Exercise your rights, but don't flaunt them. 

The Concept GOD as a Limit Concept

The concept GOD is the concept of a being that cannot be constituted in consciousness in Husserl's sense of 'constitution,' a being that cannot be a transcendence-in-immanence, but must be absolutely transcendent, transcendent in itself, not merely for us.  It follows that there cannot be a phenomenology of God. At best, there can be a phenomenology of such of our experiences as purport to be of or about God.

We know that the concept GOD is the concept of something absolutely transcendent, and we know this by purely conceptual means. We have the concept GOD and we analyze it: we simply unpack its meaning. Whatever the origin of this concept, it is there in us and available for analysis. Of course, we cannot learn by conceptual analysis that God exists, but we can know something about what God cannot be like, if he does exist.  We can know, for example, that God, if he exists, is not a concept.  No surprise here, and nothing that distinguishes God from my chair, since my chair is not a concept either.  (One cannot sit on a concept.)  The difference between the concept CHAIR and the concept GOD is the difference between an ordinary concept and a limit concept (Grenzbegriff).* 

This is the distinction between those concepts that can capture (mirror, represent) the essences or natures of the things of which they are the concepts, and those concepts that cannot. Call the first type ordinary concepts and the second limit concepts. Thus the concept CUBE captures the essence of every cube, which is to be a three-dimensional solid bounded by six square faces or sides with three meeting at each vertex, and it captures this essence fully.   The concept HELIOTROPIC PLANT captures, partially,  the essence of those plants that exhibit diurnal or seasonal motion of plant parts in response to the direction of the sun.  Concepts are mental representations.  Essences are extra-mental.

Now the concept GOD cannot be ordinary since this concept cannot capture the essence of God. For (i) in God essence and existence are one, and (ii) there is no ordinary concept of existence.

Ad (i). That in God essence and existence are one follows from the fact that nothing could count as the Absolute if it were a composite of essence and existence.  And we know by conceptual analysis that God is the Absolute: the concept GOD is the concept of 'something' absolute.  This is the case whether or not God exists.

Ad (ii).  When I say that there is no ordinary concept of existence, I mean that there is no ordinary (non-limit) concept that is adequate to existence. (There are bogus concepts of existence such as Quine's.) There is no ordinary (non-limit) concept of existence because the existence of a thing, as other than its essence, cannot be conceptualized.  Why not? 

This is because each existing thing has its own existence.  Thus the existence of Al is Al's existence, the existence of Bob is Bob's, and the existence of Carla is Carla's.  For the existence of a thing is that which makes that very thing exist.  Existence cannot be a property like being human, being sentient, being sunburned.  These properties are multiply instantiable; existence, however, is not multiply instantiable. There are no instances of existence.  

Now if each thing has its own existence, then existence is implicated in the irreducible singularity of each existing thing. Irreducible singularity, in turn, cannot be conceptualized by minds like ours which trade only in the general and multiply instantiable. It's an Aristotelian point. If Aristotle wrote in Latin it would go: individuum qua individuum ineffabile est. The individual as such, the singular as such,  is ineffable and cannot be conceptualized.  The Peripatetic tells us that science is never of the particular as particular but only of the particular as exhibiting general or repeatable features. The particular as such is unrepeatable.   But of course there are no individuals (particulars) bare of properties. Every finite individual is a this-such. This is a law of metaphyica generalis. So, while the individual as individual cannot be conceptualized, the individual as bearer of properties can be conceptualized as an instance of those properties.  If  I think of Mary as an instance of lovable properties, then I abstract from the haecceity (thisness) that makes her different numerically from her indiscernible twin Sherry.  So if I love Mary precisely and only as an instance of lovable properties, then it will make no difference to my so loving her whether Mary or Sherry is its object. It will, however, make a difference to Mary. "I want that you should love me for what makes me me, and not for what I have in common with her!"  I explain this all in great detail in Do We Love the Person or Only Her Qualities?

The crucial point here is that when we think of an individual as an instance of properties, we abstract from (leave out of consideration) the individual's thisness and its existence.  I am not saying that the existence and the thisness of a concrete individual are one and the same; I am saying that that they go together as a matter of metaphysical necessity.  

Ad (i + ii).  In God there is no real distinction between existence and nature. That was the first point. The second was that no ordinary (non-limit) concept captures the individuality of the thing of which it is the concept. Therefore, since God is (identically) his nature, there can be no ordinary concept of God, whence it follows frat GOD is a limit concept.

There is, then, a  clear sense in which God is unconceptualizable or unbegreiflich: he cannot be grasped by the use of any ordinary concept. But it doesn't follow that we have no concept of God.  We do. The concept GOD is a limit concept: it is the concept of something that cannot be grasped using ordinary concepts.  Our cognitive architecture is such that we can grasp only the general, the repeatable, but never the irreducibly singular.  The concept GOD, however, is the concept of 'something' absolutely and irreducibly singular.  God is one without a second, one without even the possibility of a second. Any god that doesn't satisfy this metaphysical exigency just isn't worth his salt.

The concept GOD is the concept of something that lies at the outer limit of discursive intelligibility, and indeed just beyond that limit. We can argue up to this Infinite Object/Subject, but then discursive operations must cease. We cannot penetrate the divine essence since this essence is one with existence, and existence cannot be conceptually penetrated. We can however point to God, in a manner of speaking, using limit concepts. The concept GOD is the concept of an infinite, absolute and wholly transcendent reality whose realitas formalis so exceeds our powers of understanding that it cannot be taken up into the realitas objectiva of any of our ordinary concepts.

Now if you have followed that, then you are in a position to see that the following objection is a 'cheap shot' easily dismissed.  "You contradict yourself. You say that God cannot be conceptualized but at the same time you operate with a concept of God as unconceptualizable."  But no contradiction arises once we distinguish ordinary from limit concepts. 

If the critic accuses me of inventing a distinction ad hoc to save the ineffability and transcendence of God, then my reply will be that there are numerous other examples of limit concepts.  See the aptly appellated category, Limit Concepts. 

________________

*The term Grenzbegriff first enters philosophy in 1781 in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Curiously, he uses the term only once in the works he himself published. The term surfaces a few more times in his Nachlass.  The sole passage in the published works is at A255/B311 where Kant remarks that the concept noumenon is a Grenzbegriff.

Among the Riddles of Existence

Among the riddles of existence are the riddles that are artifacts of the attempts of thinkers to unravel the riddle of existence. This is one way into philosophy. It is the way of G. E. Moore. What riddled him was not the world so much as the strange things philosophers such as F. H. Bradley said about it.  

If the Moorean way were the only way, there would be no philosophy. Moore was very sharp but superficial. Yet you cannot ignore him if you are serious about philosophy.  For you cannot ignore surfaces and seemings and the sense that is common. Bradley, perhaps not as sharp, is deep.  I am of the tribe of Bradley. Temperament and sensibility play major roles in our tribal affiliation as our own William James would insist and did insist in Chapter One of his Pragmatism with his distinction between the tender-minded and the tough-minded.

The entry to which I have just linked has it that the tender-minded are dogmatic as opposed to skeptical. Bradley, though tender-minded, is not. He is avis rara, not easily pigeon-holed. He soars above the sublunary in a manner quite his own.  On wings of wax like Icarus?  Like Kant's dove?  Said dove soars through the air  and imagines it could soar higher and with less effort if there were no air to offer resistance.  But the dove is mistaken.  The dove on the wing does not understand the principle of the wing, Bernoulli's principle.  Is the metaphysician  like the dove? The dove needs the air to fly. Can the metaphysician cut loose from the sensible and sublunary and make the ascent to the Absolute?

In the face of temperament and sensibility argument comes too late. 

Bradley and James seem to agree on the latterliness of argument. In the preface to Appearance and Reality, Oxford 1893, Bradley quotes from his notebook:

Metaphysics is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct, but to find these reasons is no less an instinct. (p. x)

But why 'bad'? If I could speak to Bradley's shade I would suggest this emendation:  

Metaphysics is the finding of plausible, though not rationally compelling, reasons for what we believe upon instinct . . . .

Nietzsche too can be brought in: "Every philosophy is its author's Selbsterkenntnis, self-knowledge." 

As for Moore, is he the real deal? My young self scorned him. No true philosopher! He gets his problems from books, not from the world! The young man was basically right, but extreme in the manner of the young.   I have come to appreciate Moore's subtlety and workmanship.

Against Spiritual Self-Help

Because we are spiritual beings, we pray. Because we cannot be lamps unto ourselves, we need to.

Logical Barbarity

One encounters it in leftists for whom what is not a mere opinion is a 'checkable fact' -- hence 'fact-checking.'  These chucklewits lack the category of the considered opinion. Considered opinions lie between mere opinions and known facts.

'Equity' is Unjust

'Equity' in 'wokespeak' is a deliberately obfuscatory term for equality of outcome. There is no 'equity' in the natural order of things. So it must be enforced from above. Such enforcement, of course, is unjust. I will leave you to work out the details for yourself. Why do I have to do all the work?

Reason's Ultimate Purpose

Karlfried Graf Durckheim, Absolute Living, p 127: ". . . reason's ultimate purpose is to clear the way for something that transcends it . . . ."

Self-Discipline and Self-Indulgence

To the self-disciplined, the satisfactions of self-discipline far outweigh the pleasures of self-indulgence.  If you don't agree, then I will presume you to be self-indulgent. 

A Foolish Notion

Foolish  is the notion that the truth must not be spoken if it could possibly be used to harm someone or hurt his feelings.

The Leftist as Denier of Distinctions

The 'woker' the leftist, the broader the scope of the denial of distinctions necessary for clear thought and rationally informed action. Here are just some of them:

• citizen-noncitizen
• asylum-illegal entry
• legal immigration-illegal immigration
• immigration-emigration. This distinction elided by talk of 'migrants.' 
• hate-dissent
• sex-gender
• dissenting speech-violence
• tax-penalty
• buy back-confiscation
• et cetera ad nauseam.

Jack Kerouac on Robert Lax

During his years of unsuccess, when he was actually at his purest and best, an "unpublished freak," as he describes himself in a late summer 1954 letter to Robert Giroux, living for his art alone, Kerouac contemplated entering a monastery: "I've become extremely religious and may go to a monastery before even before you do." [. . .] "I've recently made friends in a way with Bob Lax and I find him sweet -- tho I think his metaphysics are pure faith. Okay, that's what it's supposed to be." (Selected Letters 1940-1956, ed. Charters, Penguin 1995, p. 444.)

And then on pp. 446-448 we find an amazing 26 October [sic!] 1954 letter to Robert Lax packed with etymology and scholarly detail which ends:

I'm no saint, I'm sensual, I cant resist wine, am liable to sneers & secret wraths & attachment to imaginary lures before my eyes -- but I intend to ascend by stages & self-control to the Vow to help all sentient beings find enlightenment and holy escape from sin and stain of life-body itself [. . .] but thank God I'm a lazy bum because of that repose will come, in repose the secret, and in the secret: Ceaseless Ecstasy.

"Nirvana, as when the rain puts out a little fire."

See you in the world,

Jack K.

For information on the enigmatic hermit Robert Lax (1915-2000) , see here

Robert Lax: A Life Slowly Lived is especially good. Excerpts:

One of the touchstone words in Lax’s spiritual vocabulary was “waiting”. By this he meant being still, standing one’s ground, knowing one’s ground, but never quite knowing the reality of what was awaited, longed for. In his volume 33 Poems, recently reissued by New Directions, he puts it this way:

Wake up & wait. Lie down & wait. Sit up again & wait. All in the dark now. No way of telling day from night. Do I expect to hear a voice? See a light? A dim one? A bright one? See a face? I sit up. I’m alert. Do I know what to expect? [2]

“What you see,” said Paul Spaeth, keeper of the Lax archive at St Bonaventure, “is the opposite of what can be called social action. What you see is a slowing down and waiting on God. Very much in keeping with the monastic tradition. Also very similar to the Buddhist tradition of moment to moment mindfulness.”

Robert Lax with his two close friends: Thomas Merton (middle) and the abstract painter, Ad Reinhardt (left). Photograph courtesy of the Thomas Merton Center © Bellarmine University

Unlike his friend Thomas Merton, the Trappist poet and author who shared Lax’s interest in Buddhism and brought his name to the world in The Seven Storey Mountain, [3] Lax never lived a life of structured monasticism. A Jewish convert to Catholicism, he built for himself an interior monastery, within which he wrote, prayed, contemplated, and received many visitors: poets, painters, writers (he’d been friends with the legendary abstract artist, Ad Reinhardt, and with Jack Kerouac), and spiritual seekers.  “Lax can be thought of as a mystic,” said his biographer Michael N. McGregor, who nevertheless refrained from using that word in his book Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax. [4] He shared his subject’s aversion to the superficiality of labels. He wanted readers to come to their own conclusions about who he was, what he was.

Steve Georgiou, a seeker from California and author of The Way of the Dreamcatcher, a book of dialogues with Lax, remembers their walks down to Skala, the Patmos harbour. “He would walk with a slow roll like the roll of a boat. He would take his meditative steps, encouraging you to slow down yourself and feel the actual experience of walking”. [5]

For Lax, there was no seam between walking, praying, writing. All experiences were to be fully absorbed, integrated into a life fully lived. Once Georgiou saw his friend writing a single word – “river” – over and over. He asked him why. “I want to live with the word for a while,” Lax said.

one word at a time.
I believe
I believe
that all people
should stop their fight;
I believe that one should
blow a whistle or
sing or play
on the
lute [6]

An Old Descartes Joke

In the fall of 1989 a female student at Case Western Reserve University told me the following Descartes joke.

Our man stops at a bar, the 'tender asks whether he wants a drink, Descartes says, "I think not, then disappears. I replied, pedantically, "I think therefore I am" is not logically equivalent to "I think not therefore I am not" any more than "I am walking therefore I am moving" is logically equivalent to "I am not walking therefore I am not moving." So the joke rests on a logical mistake.

But this is true of many if not most jokes.  I have toyed with the notion that most humor stems from logico-conceptual incoherence of one sort or another, ambiguity, amphiboly, equivocation and various formal mistakes.   Another example is Yogi Berra's "If you come to a fork in the road, take it."  Or:  "Who was that lady I saw you with last night?  That was no lady, that was my wife!"  Or:  "I see you got a haircut.  No, I got 'em all cut."

Evil as Privation and the Problem of Pain, Part One (2021 Version)

For Vito Caiati.  This 2021 version of a November 2010 post corrects unclarities, infelicities of expression, and outright errors in the initial entry . And the font is more legible for ancient eyes.

.........................

When theists are confronted by atheists with the various arguments from evil, the former should not reject the premise that objective evil exists.  That would eliminate the problem, but eliminativism here as elsewhere in philosophy is a shabby evasion. (Example: How does brain activity give rise to consciousness? No problem! Consciousness is an illusion!) Evil exists and it is not merely subjective. But the same is true of holes. See Holes and Their Mode of Being.  Holes are not nothing, and that is objectively the case despite their being absences.  You could say that holes have no positive entitative status and are only as privations.  (Curiously, as argued in the linked entry, they are empirically detectable absences which is another reason to hold that they are not nothing.)

So, to accommodate the objective reality of evil we should consider whether perhaps evil has no positive entitative status and is only as a privation. In classical jargon, this is the view of evil as privatio boni. Thus Augustine, Enchiridion XI:

For what is that which we call evil but the absence of good? In the bodies of animals, disease and wounds mean nothing but the absence of health; for when a cure is effected, that does not mean that the evils which were present --namely, the diseases and wounds -- go away from the body and dwell elsewhere: they altogether cease to exist; for the wound or disease is not a substance, but a defect in the fleshly substance, -- the flesh itself being a substance, and therefore something good, of which those evils -- that is, privations of the good which we call health -- are accidents. Just in the same way, what are called vices in the soul are nothing but privations of natural good. And when they are cured, they are not transferred elsewhere: when they cease to exist in the healthy soul, they cannot exist anywhere else.

If evil is a privation or absence then the ancient problem -- dating back beyond David Hume to Epicurus -- of reconciling the existence of God (as traditionally defined) with the existence of evil seems either to dissolve or else become rather more tractable. Indeed, if the evil-as-privation thesis is coupled with the Platonic notion alive in both Augustine and Aquinas that Goodness is itself good as the Primary Good, the unique exemplar of goodness whence all good things receive their goodness, then one can argue from the existence of evils-as-privations to the existence of that of which they are privations. But that is a separate and very difficult topic.

Without going that far, let us first  note that the evil-as-privation doctrine does seem to accommodate an intuition that many of us have, namely, that good and evil, though opposed, are not mutually independent. Thus in one clear sense good and evil are opposites: what is good is not evil and what is evil is not good. And yet one hesitates to say that they are on an ontological par, that they are equally real. They are not opposed as two positivities. The evil of ignorance is not something positive in its own right: the evil of ignorance consists in its being an absence of something good, knowledge. Good is an ontological prius; evil has a merely derivative status as an absence of good.  In fact, I will lay it down as a condition of adequacy for any theory of evil that evil not be hypostatized.  If a (primary) substance is anything metaphysically capable of independent existence, then evil is not a substance.  That way lies Manicheanism.  There are no two co-equal 'principles' eternally at war, Good and Evil.  

The Problem of Pain

But then how are we to think of animal and human pain, whether physical or mental? Pains are standardly cited as examples of natural or physical evils as opposed to moral evils that come into the world via a misuse of free will.  Suppose you have just slammed your knee against the leg of a table. Phenomenologically, the pain is something all-too-positive. The  what-it-is-like is something quite distinctive. (This hyphenated locution from Thomas Nagel.) It is not a mere absence of well-being, but the presence of ill-being. Compare an absence of sensation in the knee with intense pain in the knee. An absence of sensation, as in a numb knee, is a mere lack; but a pain is not a mere lack, but something positive in its own right. This seems to show that not all evils can be privations.

The argument in nuce is that not all evils can be privations of good because a  felt pain is a positively evil sensation that is not an absence, lack, or privation of something good.  And so we cannot dismiss evil as privatio boni.

The same seems to hold for mental pains such as an intense sadness. It is not merely an absence of happiness, but something positive in its own right. Hence, the evil of sadness is not merely a privation of the good of happiness.  Examples are easily multiplied: Angst, terror, clinical depression, etc.

Two Possible Responses

Felt pains are counterexamples to the thesis that evils are privationes boni only if they are both evil and objectively real. Therefore:

A. One might argue that felt pains are evil but that the painfulness of a felt pain is a matter of projection.  One might flesh this out as follows. There is a certain sensory quale that I experience when my knee slams into the leg of the table. Call this the experiential substratum of the pain. I am not talking about the physical damage to the knee, if any, or about anything physical. By the experiential substratum I mean the felt datum precisely and only as felt, as lived though, as experienced.  I am talking about the physical pain as a phenomenal datum. The painfulness of this felt pain is something else again. On the objection now being considered, the painfulness of the felt pain is a matter of projection or interpretation or 'attitude': it is something supplied by the subject. The experiential substratum, the sensory quale, exists in objective reality despite the fact that its esse est percipi. But the painfulness, and thus the evil or badness of the sensory quale is an interpretation from the side of the sufferer.

What's more, this interpretation or projection can be altered or withdrawn entirely. Thus, with practice, one can learn to focus one's attention on a painful sensory quale and in so doing lessen its painfulness. If you try this, it works to some extent. After a long day of hiking over rocky trails, my feet hurt. But I say to myself, "It's only a sensation, and your aversion to it is your doing." "Master desire and aversion!" Focusing on the sensation in this way, and noting that one's attitude towards it plays a role in the painfulness, one can reduce the painfulness.  One reduces the painfulness but without eliminating the felt pain. You still feel the sensation, but you have withheld the aversive overlay. If you try it, you will see that it works to some extent.   This suggests that the painfulness is merely subjective.

Unfortunately, this response is not convincing as a general response to the problem of pain.   Imagine the physical and mental suffering of one who is being tortured to death. And then try to convince yourself that the pain in a situation like this is just a matter of 'attitude' or aversion. "Conquer desire and aversion" is a good Buddhist maxim. And a good Stoic one as well.  But I find it hard to swallow the notion that the painfulness of every painful sensation derives from the second-order stance of aversion.

I conclude that plenty of felt pains are not only objectively real but also objectively evil: their evilness is not a subjective addition.

B. One might argue that pains are objectively real, but not evil since they are outweighed by greater goods. But I'll leave the elaboration of this response for Part II. Brevity is the soul of blog.

Propaganda

Despite the term's largely pejorative connotation, propaganda is not by definition false or misleading or harmful. Propaganda is anything of a verbal or pictorial nature that is propagated to influence behavior. Propaganda can consist of truths or falsehoods, good advice or bad, exhortation to good behavior or subornation of bad. Anti-smoking and anti-drug messaging are propaganda but the messages are salutary. Leftist propaganda is destructive, as recent events make abundantly clear,  while conservative propaganda inspires ameliorative action.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Weather Conditions

Earl Scruggs and Friends, Foggy Mountain Breakdown

Ella Fitzgerald, Misty. Beats the Johnny Mathis version. A standard from the Great American Songbook.

Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze. Not from the Great American Songbook. And presumably not about weather conditions.  'Scuse me while I kiss the sky? Or: 'Scuse me while I kiss this guy?

Cream, Sunshine of Your Love

Tom Waits, Emotional Weather Report

Art Garfunkel and James Taylor, Crying in the Rain. Written by Carole King and popularized by the Everly Bros.

Ramblin' Jack Elliot, Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain. Written by Fred Rose and performed by Roy Acuff in the '40s.

Now my hair is turned to silver
All my life I've loved in vain
I can see her star in heaven
Blue eyes cryin' in the rain.

Someday when we meet up yonder
We'll stroll hand in hand again
In a land that knows no parting
Blue eyes crying in the rain.

Allman Bros., Blue Sky

Kansas, Dust in the Wind

Eric Clapton, Let It Rain

Dave van Ronk and the Hudson Dusters, Clouds ("Both Sides Now").  This beautiful version by "The Mayor of MacDougal Street" goes out to Oregon  luthier Dave Bagwill who I know will appreciate it. Judy Collins made a hit of it. And you still doubt that the '60s was the greatest decade for American popular music?  Speaking of the greatest decade, it was when the greatest writer of American popular songs, bar none, Bob Dylan, made his mark. Some generational chauvinism is justified! 

Joan Baez, A Hard Rain's A Gonna Fall Could Johnny Mercer write a song like this?

Eva Cassidy, Over the Rainbow. Another old standard from the Great American Songbook.

Tom Waits, On a Foggy Night

Rolling Stones, She's a Rainbow

Dan Fogelberg, Rhythm of the Rain

Cascades, Rhythm of the Rain. The original.

Dee Clark, Raindrops. Manny Mora:

"Raindrops" is a 1961 song by the American R&B singer Dee Clark. Released in April of that same year, this ballad peaked at position 2 on the Hot 100 and at position 3 on the R&B chart.  [. . .]

Clark's biggest hit was also his last. [. . .]

Clark had a brief revival in 1975 when his song "Ride a Wild Horse" became a surprise Top 30 hit in the UK Singles Chart, becoming his first chart hit in the UK since "Just Keep It Up." Afterwards, Clark performed mostly on the oldies circuit. By the late 1980s, he was in dire straits financially, living in a welfare hotel in Toccoa, Georgia. Despite suffering a stroke in 1987 that left him partially paralyzed and with a mild speech impediment, he continued to perform until his death on December 7th 1990, in Smyrna, Georgia, from a heart attack at the age of 52. His last concert was with the Jimmy Gilstrap Band at the Portman Lounge in Anderson, South Carolina.

Dave Bagwill sends us to a clip in which Dave van Ronk talks a bit about the days of the "Great American Folk Scare" and then sings his signature number, "Green, Green, Rocky Road."

Don't Surrender to the Left on Language

The Left's destructiveness extends even unto language. The subversion of language is the mother of all subversion. Punch back against the linguistic hijackers. Here's some argumentative ammo from Peter Kreeft's Socratic Logic, 3rd ed., p. 36, n. 1:

 

The use of the traditional inclusive generic pronoun "he" is a decision of language, not of gender justice. There are only six alternatives. (1) We could use the grammatically misleading and numerically incorrect "they." But when we say "one baby was healthier than the others because they didn't drink that milk," we do not know whether the antecedent of "they" is "one" or "others," so we don't know whether to give or take away the milk. Such language codes could be dangerous to baby's health. (2) Another alternative is the politically intrusive "in-your-face" generic "she," which I would probably use if I were an angry, politically intrusive, in-your-face woman, but I am not any of those things. (3) Changing "he" to "he or she" refutes itself in such comically clumsy and ugly revisions as the following: "What does it profit a man or woman if he or she gains the whole world but loses his or her own soul? Or what shall a man or woman give in exchange for his or her soul?" The answer is: he or she will give up his or her linguistic sanity. (4) We could also be both intrusive and clumsy by saying "she or he." (5) Or we could use the neuter "it," which is both dehumanizing and inaccurate. (6) Or we could combine all the linguistic garbage together and use "she or he or it," which, abbreviated, would sound like "sh . . . it." I believe in the equal intelligence and value of women, but not in the intelligence or value of "political correctness," linguistic ugliness, grammatical inaccuracy, conceptual confusion, or dehumanizing pronouns.

What a sexist Neanderthaler this Kreeft fellow is! Send him to a re-education camp!

 

 

Faith Animated by Doubt

A living faith is animated by doubt. Faith dies when it hardens into a subjective certainty and a moribund complacency. I have had this thought for years. Each time I re-enact it, it strikes me as true. I was pleased to discover recently that T. S. Eliot holds the same or a very similar view:

'For people of intellect I think that doubt is inevitable,' Eliot once told an interviewer. The doubter is a man who takes the problem of his faith seriously.'

The quotation is from the outstanding 712 pp. biography by Lyndall Gordon, T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life, W. W. Norton & Co, 1998, p. 112.

Doubt, the engine of inquiry, is the purifier of the quest for contact with that which lies beyond inquiry.

Not All Academic Philosophers are Leftists!

Dissident Philosophers

Voices Against the Political Current of the Academy

EDITED BY T. ALLAN HILLMAN AND TULLY BORLAND

The book consists of sixteen essays (and an introduction) from prominent philosophers who are at odds with the predominant political trend(s) of academic philosophy, political trend(s) primarily associated with leftism. Some of these philosophers identify explicitly with the political right – an admittedly broad term which ranges from American conservative to British Tory, from religious right to non-religious right, from libertarian to authoritarian. Yet other dissident philosophers eschew the left/right dichotomy altogether while maintaining a firm political distance from the majority of their (left-leaning) colleagues. The primary goal of the volume is to represent a broad constituency of political philosophies and perspectives at variance with the prevailing political sentiments of the academy. Each essay is partly autobiographical in nature, detailing personal experiences that have influenced these philosophers throughout their lives, and partly philosophical, putting forth reflections on the intellectual viability of a right-leaning (or decidedly non-left leaning) political philosophy or some segment of it. The contemporary university is supposed to be the locus of viewpoint diversity, and yet as is evident to professors, students, and virtually anyone else who sets foot within its halls, it most certainly is not – particularly in matters political. Nevertheless, these essays are not instances of special-pleading or grievance incitement. Instead, each article provides a glimpse into the life of an academic philosopher whose views have largely been at odds with peers and colleagues. Furthermore, all of the essays were consciously constructed with the aim of being philosophically rigorous while eschewing technical language and verbose prose. In short, the essays will be enjoyable to a wide audience.

....................................

My Facebook comments:  

Your humble correspondent's contribution is entitled "From Democrat to Dissident." Click on the link to see the Table of Contents and a review. I was planning on buying a number of copies for my friends. But the $120 price tag is somewhat disuassive.

I have carefully read the introductory chapter by Allan Hillman and Tully Borland. Well written, exciting, rigorous, with a delightful soupçon of snark.

The Left gets its collective and collectivist @ss royally kicked by a formidable crew of philosophers. Formidable or not, I am honored to be among them.

Food: Medicine, Drug, or Fuel?

In an excess of the ascetic, the author of The Confessions in Book Ten, Chapter 31 recommends taking food as medicine. At the opposite extreme we find those for whom it is a soporific, a sedative, an escape from reality, a drug. The wise tread the middle path: food is fuel.  

Eat in quantity and quality precisely that alone which optimally fuels fratre asino so that he may bear up well in this vale where his services are indispensable.   Properly fortified, he will carry your load over many a pons asinorum.

Liberals Need to Preach What They Practice

Substack latest.

Against the racism of reduced expectations.

Two Worries about Meditation

One Christian friend worries that his meditation practice might lead him in a Buddhist direction, in particular toward an acceptance of the three marks of phenomenal existence: anicca, anatta, dukkha.  He shouldn't worry. Those doctrines in their full-strength Pali  form are dubious if not demonstrably untenable. As such, they cannot be veridical deliverances of any meditation practice. 

For example, the doctrine of anicca, impermanence, is not a mere recording of the Moorean fact that there is change; it is a radical theory of change along Heraclitean lines.  As a theory it is dialectically driven and not a summary of phenomenology. One could read it into the phenomenology of meditational experience, but one cannot derive it from the phenomenology. The claim I just made is highly contentious; I will leave it to the first friend to see if he can verify it to his own satisfaction.

Since he is a Christian I recommend to him an approach to meditation more in consonance with Christianity, an approach  as inner listening.  In one sentence: Quiet the mind, then listen and wait.  Open yourself to intimations and vouchsafings from the Unseen Order. Psalm 46:10: "Be still and know that I am God . . . ." But be aware that the requisite receptivity exposes one to attack from demonic agents whose power exceeds our own. So discernment is needed.

This brings me to a second Christian friend who asks, "Do you think the mind clearing function of meditation might be akin to the person Jesus taught us of, the person with a clean and emptied soul that was attractive to the demons as a place to occupy?"  

Yes, there is that danger. A mind cluttered and distracted by  petty thoughts and concerns is, from the point of view of the demons, safe against any irruption of divine light. This is why demons are more likely to be encountered in monasteries than in fleshpots. But once the mind is cleared of mundane detritus, once it returns from the diaspora of the sense world and rests quietly in it itself in its quest for the Unchanging Light, the demons have an opening.  But these facts of the spiritual life are no argument against meditation; they are an argument for caution. One would be well-advised to preface every meditation session with a discursive prayer along these lines: "Lord, I confess my spiritual infirmity and humbly ask to be protected from any and all demonic agents. Lord help me, guardians guard me." Sancti Angeli, custodes nostri, defendite nos in proelio, ut non pereamus in tremendo iudicio.  

My second friend is a Protestant, and among other faults, they fail to appreciate the mystical element in Christianity.

Finally:

The East no more owns meditation than the Left owns dissent.  Here is a quick little bloggity-blog schema.

Buddhist Nihilism: the ultimate goal is nibbana, cessation, and the final defeat of the 'self' illusion.

Hindu Monism: the ultimate goal is for the little self (jivatman) to merge with the Big Self, Atman = Brahman.

Christian Dualism: the ultimate goal is neither extinction nor merger but a participation in the divine life in which the participant, transfigured and transformed as he undoubtedly would have to be, nevertheless maintains his identity as a unique self.  Dualism is retained in a sublimated form.

I warned you that my schema would be quick. But I think it is worth ruminating on and filling in.  The true philosopher tacks between close analysis and overview, analytic squinting and syn-opsis and pan-opsis.

You say you want details?

Related

A 'No' to 'No Self' 

Can the Chariot Take Us to the Land of No Self? 

Buber on Buddhism and Other Forms of Mysticism

Is Belief Voluntary?

Why would it matter? Here is one reason.

If the experts are evenly divided on some question, many will urge that that the rational thing to do is to suspend belief.  To satisfy the dictates of reason, then, one ought to suspend or withhold belief in some cases. But 'ought' implies 'can.'  So, if one ought to suspend belief, then one has the ability to suspend belief, which implies that at least some beliefs or rather believings are under a person's voluntary control.  I say that some are. That makes me a limited doxastic voluntarist.  Catherine Elgin says that none are:

Belief is not voluntary. Belief aims at truth in the sense that a belief is defective if its content is not true. If believing were something we could do or refrain from doing at will, the connection to truth would be severed. If Jack could believe that Neanderthals were an evolutionary dead end just because he wanted to, then his believing that Neanderthals were a evolutionary dead end would not amount to his thinking  that 'Neanderthals were an evolutionary dead end' is true. For nothing about the fate of the Neanderthals is affected by what he wants. ("Persistent Disagreement" in Disagreement, eds. Feldman and Warfield, Oxford UP 2013, p. 60) 

This argument leaks like a sieve. Either that, or I don't understand it.

It is true that belief is connected to truth. But what exactly is the connection?  If I believe that p, then I believe it to be true that p.  That is the connection. I cannot believe that p without believing that it is true that p. But of course my believing that it is true that p is consistent with p's being false.

Now suppose that the evidence available to me for and against the existence of God is equal, and I choose to believe for prudential reasons, say, or for no reason at all, that God exists. This choosing  to believe would not sever the connection between believing and truth. For again,  the connection is just this: my believing that p entails my believing that p is true.  That connection remain in place whether or not believing is voluntary.  My believing that God exists does not make it true that God exists. Believing entails believing to be true; it does not entail being true!

The same holds if I choose to disbelieve that God exists or if I choose to suspend belief. My disbeleiving that p does not make p false. And my suspending that p does not make p indeterminate in truth value.

Elgin tells us that "a belief is defective if its content is not true."  But surely an occurrent mental state is a believing whether or not its content is true.  A false belief is just  as much a belief as a true belief.  Surely Elgin is not telling us that only true beliefs are beliefs! But then what is she saying?

Elgin writes, "If Jack could believe that Neanderthals were an evolutionary dead end just because he wanted to, then his believing that Neanderthals were an evolutionary dead end would not amount to his thinking  that 'Neanderthals were an evolutionary dead end' is true."

Elgin seems to have a 'straw man' conception of doxastic voluntarism. After all, no one holds that the fate of the Neanderthals depends on what anyone thinks or believes. If the paleontologists are evenly divided on the question and Jack chooses to believe that the Neanderthals were an evolutionary dead end, he is not thereby committing himself to the absurd notion that his so believing makes it true that the Neanderthals were an evolutionary dead end.   

With respect to a purely theoretical question like this, one the answer to which has no practical consequences for the believer, the doxastically (as opposed to practically) rational thing to do would be to suspend judgment/belief.  If so, then some believings/disbelievings/suspensions come under the control of the will.

A Lit-Crit Fest

At My Facebook page. I posed the question whether JOHN BARTH is worth reading. 29 comments and counting.

A is A: Monism Refuted

This from The Collected Poems and Epigrams of J. V. Cunningham, Swallow Press, 1971, p. 118, epigram #47:

This Monist who reduced the swarm
Of being to a single form,
Emptying the universe for fun,
Required two A's to think them one.

Notes

1. The title is Cunningham's own.

2. Poetic license extends to use-mention confusion.

3. It was over at Patrick Kurp's place that I first made the acquaintance of Mr. Cunningham.

4. Note the poetically pleasing addition by the author of his name to the title of his collection.

5. My copy of Cunningham's collection, a well-made hard bound, acquired via Amazon, is a Mount Mary College (Milwaukee, Wisconsin) library discard.  There is no evidence that it is a second copy.  How naïve of me to think that libraries ought to be permanent repositories of high culture.  But the folly of reliably liberal librarians redounds to the benefit of the bookman.

6. Philosophically, the trick is to uphold the supreme truth that all is indeed One while accommodating the manifest and non-illusory plurality of things and persons. 

Visions of Tom: Jack Kerouac's Monastic Elder Brother

Thomas Merton's "spontaneous prose" is to be found in the seven volumes of his journals. That's where you will find the real Merton in all his depth and complexity, his faith, his doubts, his inner (and outer) conflicts, and his endless self-examination. I never tire of re-reading them.

 

This essay by Angus Stuart delineates some Kerouac-Merton parallels.

 

"Even the timing of their own deaths is remarkably close: Merton on December 10, 1968 and Kerouac less than a year later on October 21, 1969." Kerouac died of drink at age 47, Merton of electrocution at age 53.

The Conservative Mind

Innovations are presumed guilty until proven innocent. There is a defeasible presumption in favor of traditional beliefs, usages, institutions, arrangements, techniques, and whatnot, provided they work. By all means allow the defeat of the outworn and no-longer-workable: in with the new if the novel is better. But the burden of proof is on the would-be innovator: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Conservatives are not opposed to change. We are opposed to non-ameliorative change, and change for the sake of change.

 

And once again, how can anyone who loves his country desire its fundamental transformation? How can anyone love anything who desires its fundamental transformation?

 

You love a girl and want to marry her. But you propose that she must first undergo a total makeover: butt lift, tummy tuck, nose job, breast implants, psychological re-wire, complete doxastic overhaul, sensus divinitatis tune-up, Weltanschauung change-out, memory upgrade, and so on. Do you love her, or is she merely the raw material for the implementation of your  idea of what a girl should be?

 

The extension to love of country is straightforward. If you love your country, then you do not desire its fundamental transformation. Contrapositively, if you do desire its fundamental transformation, then you do not love it.

Kerouac No Role Model

Lest I lead  astray any young and impressionable readers, I am duty-bound to point out that my annual October focus on Kerouac is by no means to be taken as an endorsement of him as someone to be imitated.  Far from it! He failed utterly to live up to the Christian precepts that he learned as a child and the Buddhist precepts he assiduously studied in the mid-1950s.  Not that he was a hypocrite; he was just a deeply flawed human being. 

I just now recall a critique of Kerouac by Douglas Groothuis from some years ago.  (Old Memory Babe ain't got nothing on me.)  Ah yes, here it is.   I am in basic agreement with it.

Kerouac's Beat(ific) Visions and the Cross

A good essay by Joshua Hren at First Things.

What Hren says is complemented by this entry of mine from 31 October 2010:

The despairing section X of Book Thirteen of Vanity of Duluoz which I quoted yesterday is followed immediately by this:

Yet I saw the cross just then when I closed my eyes after writing all this.  I cant escape its mysterious penetration into all this brutality.  I just simply SEE it all the time, even the Greek cross sometimes.  I hope it will all turn out true.

It is fitting to conclude Kerouac month with the last section of Jack's last book, a section in which, while alluding to the Catholic mass, he raises his glass to his own piecemeal suicide:

Forget it wifey. Go to sleep. Tomorrow's another day. Hic calix! Look that up in Latin, it means "Here's the chalice," and be sure there's wine in it.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Songs with 'When" in the Title

B. B. King, Nobody Knows You when You're Down and Out

John Fogerty, When Will I Be Loved?  This cover of the old Everly Bros. tune is now my favorite.

Beach Boys, When I Grow Up (to be a Man)

Bob Dylan, When the Ship Comes In

Clancy Bros., When the Ship Comes In

Laura Nyro, And When I Die

Percy Sledge, When a Man Loves a Woman

Bob Dylan, When I Paint My Masterpiece

The Band, When I Paint My Masterpiece

Bob Dylan, When the Deal Goes Down

The Core Tenets of the 'Woke' Revolution

Wake up to 'woke' by reading this outstanding piece by Bari Weiss.  It is long, but very clear, covers the essential points, includes examples and some suggestions on how to fight back, and last but not least, it receives the MavPhil plenary endorsement and nihil obstat.

And now I would like to ask any of you who are U. S. citizens and Democrats whether supporting said party makes sense for you and your family and their future and the future of the country. Please consider this question very carefully with an open mind in light of all the facts. Please do not retreat into your private life else you wake up some day soon to no private life at all.  

Let me offer the briefest overview of the core beliefs of the Woke Revolution, which are abundantly clear to anyone willing to look past the hashtags and the jargon.

It begins by stipulating that the forces of justice and progress are in a war against backwardness and tyranny. And in a war, the normal rules of the game must be suspended. Indeed, this ideology would argue that those rules are not just obstacles to justice, but tools of oppression. They are the master’s tools.  And the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house.

So the tools themselves are not just replaced but repudiated. And in so doing, persuasion—the purpose of argument—is replaced with public shaming. Moral complexity is replaced with moral certainty. Facts are replaced with feelings.

Ideas are replaced with identity. Forgiveness is replaced with punishment. Debate is replaced with de-platforming. Diversity is replaced with homogeneity of thought. Inclusion, with exclusion.

In this ideology, speech is violence. But violence, when carried out by the right people in pursuit of a just cause, is not violence at all. In this ideology, bullying is wrong, unless you are bullying the right people, in which case it’s very, very good. In this ideology, education is not about teaching people how to think, it’s about reeducating them in what to think. In this ideology, the need to feel safe trumps the need to speak truthfully. 

Read the rest below the fold:

Colander Girl

With apologies to Neil Sedaka, Calendar Girl. 

A 'pastafarian' idiot was allowed to wear a colander in an official DMV photo in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  Bring on the hoodies, the sombreros, the ski masks . . . .  Story here.

Does this have anything to do with the decline of the West?  Something.  It is just another little indication of the abdication of those in positions of authority.  A driver's license is an important document.  The authorities should not allow its being mocked by a dumbass with a piece of kitchenware on her head.  But Massachusetts is lousy with liberals, so what do you expect?  A liberal will tolerate anything except common sense and good judgment.

A penne for her thoughts as she strains to find something to believe in.  If only she would use her noodle.

Divine Light, Sex, Alcohol, and Kerouac

If there is divine light, sexual indulgence prevents it from streaming in.  Herein lies the best argument for continence.  The sex monkey may not be as destructive of the body as the booze monkey, but he is more destructive of the spirit.  You may dismiss what I am saying here either by denying that there is any divine light, or by denying that sexual indulgence impedes its influx, or both.  But if you are in the grip of either monkey I will dismiss your dismissal.  Why should I listen to a man with a monkey on his back?  How do I know it is the man speaking and not the monkey?

Poor Kerouac got the holy hell beaten out of him by the simian tag  team.   The Ellis Amburn biography goes into the greatest detail regarding Kerouac's homo- and hetero-erotic sexual excesses.  His fatal fondness for the sauce, for the devil in liquid form, is documented in all the biographies.

It is not that the lovable dharma lush did not struggle mightily in his jihad against his lower self.  He did, in his Buddhist phase in the mid-fifties, before the 1957 success of On the Road and the blandishments of fame did him in.  (Worldly $ucce$$/Suckcess is an ambiguous good.) I've already pulled some quotations from Some of the Dharma which  offers the best documentation of Jack's attempt to tread the straight path to the narrow gate.

One lesson, perhaps, is that we cannot be lamps unto ourselves even if the Tathagata succeeded in pulling himself up into Nirvana by his samsaric sandal straps.  To the vast run of us ordinary "poor suffering fucks" a religion of self-help is no help at all.  The help we need, if help there be, must come from Elsewhere.

And so in the end Jack returned to the religion of his childhood.

The Last Interview, 12 October 1969.  "I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic."  "I just sneak into church now, at dusk, at vespers. But yeah, as you get older you get more . . . genealogical."

As much of a screw-up and sinner as he was, as irresponsible, self-indulgent, and self-destructive, Kerouac was a deeply religious man.  He went through a Buddhist phase, but at the end he came home to Catholicism.  

"Everybody goes home in October." (On the Road, Part I, Ch. 14, Para 1)

Einstein 'Quotation' Abuse

Written 7 March 2005.

......................................

Senator Charles Grassley (R) was on C-SPAN this morning talking about Social Security reform among other things. He attributed the following quotation to Albert Einstein: "Compound interest is the only miracle in the world."

Did Einstein say that? I rather doubt it. It is too stupid a thing for Einstein to say. And there is no room in his worldview for miracles. There is nothing miraculous about compound interest, and there is no 'magic' in it either. It is very simple arithmetic. Suppose you invest $2000 at 10% compounded annually. At the end of the first year, you have $2,200. How much do you have at the end of the second year, assuming no additions or subtractions from the principal? $2,400? No. What you have is $2,200 + 220 = $2, 420. Where did the extra twenty bucks come from? That is interest on interest. It is the interest on interest on interest . . . that make compounding a powerful tool of wealth enhancement.

But there is nothing miraculous or magical about it. Words mean things. Use them wisely.

And don't look to Einstein for advice on personal finance. 

Withdrawn from Circulation

The very best books, or so it seems, are usually the ones that get withdrawn from circulation in local public libraries, while the trash remains on the shelves. The librarians' bad judgment, however,  redounds to my benefit as I am able to purchase fine books for fifty cents a pop. A while back, the literary luminaries at the Apache Junction Public Library saw fit to remove Linda Hamalian, A Life of Kenneth Rexroth (Norton, 1991) from the shelves.

Why, I have no idea. (It wasn't a second copy.) But I snatched it up. A find to rejoice over. A   beautifully produced first edition of over 400 pages, the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America wanted $25 for it. I shall set it on the Beat shelf next to Kerouac's Dharma Bums wherein Rexroth figures as Reinhold Cacoethes. I hope the two volumes refrain from breaking each other's spines.

Moral: Always search diligently through biblic aisles and piles, remainder bins, and the like. It is amazing what treasure lies among the trash. 

 

Conservatives, especially, are bound to find gems. The reason being that the tribe of librarians, dominated as they are by the distaff contingent, reliably tilt left and are eager to remove from the shelves what their shallow pates consider offensive materials.

Two Types of Contemplative

Those of the first type try to see into eternity by piercing the veil of space and time. They attempt to look beyond this world. The mystics and religious contemplatives are of this type. A second type is content to view the world of space, time, and matter under the aspect of eternity. Not a look beyond the world into eternity, but at it from an eternal point of view. Some philosophers are of this type. One thinks of Spinoza.  His amor dei intellectualis is an  intellectual love of God or nature, deus sive natura.

The latter is a God's eye view of the world, the former a view of God. The genitive construction is a genitivus objectivus. One naturally thinks of the visio beata of the doctor angelicus.

(There I go alliterating again. A stylistic defect? And peppering one's prose with foreign expressions is considered by some to be stylistically suboptimal, pretentious perhaps.)

Is Presentism Common Sense?

Not by my lights. But then I might be a dim bulb. 

For Alan Rhoda,

Presentism is the metaphysical thesis that whatever exists, exists now, in the present. The past is no more.  The future is not yet.  Either something exists now, or it does not exist, period. 

This is my understanding of presentism as well. Rhoda goes on to claim that presentism is "arguably the common sense position."  I beg to differ. 

It is certainly common sense that the past is no more and the future is not yet.  These are analytic truths understood by anyone who understands English.  They are beyond the reach of reasonable controversy, stating as they do that the past and the future are not present.  But presentism is a substantive metaphysical thesis well within the realm of reasonable controversy.  It is a platitude that what no longer exists does not now exist.  But there is nothing platitudinous about 'What no longer exists does not exist at all, or does not exist period, or does not exist simpliciter.'  That is a theoretical  claim of metaphysics about time and existence that is neither supported nor disqualified by common sense and the Moorean data comprising it.  The presentist is making a claim about the nature of the existence of that which exists.  He is claiming that the existence of what exists either is identical to, or necessarily equivalent to, temporal presentness.  Is it not just common sense that common sense takes no stand on any such high-flying metaphysical thesis?

In the four sentences that begin his article, Rhoda has two platitudes sandwiched between two metaphysical claims.  This gives the impression that the metaphysical claims are supported by the platitudes.  My point is that the platitudes, though consistent with the metaphysical theory, give it no aid and comfort.

Compare the problem of universals:  It is a Moorean fact that my coffee cup is blue and that I see the blueness at the cup.  But this datum neither supports nor disqualifies the metaphysical theory that blueness is a universal, nor does it either support or disqualify the competing metaphysical theory that the blueness is a particular, a trope.  Neither common sense, nor ordinary language analysis, nor phenomenology can resolve the dispute.  Dialectical considerations must be brought to bear. It is common sense that things have properties.  That they are, common sense is equipped to establish; what they are, however, common sense leaves wide open.

It is the same in the philosophy of time. Dialectical considerations must be brought to bear. JFK existed. It is true now that he existed. Indeed, it is true now that he actually existed.  If there are merely possible past individuals, JFK is not one of them: he is an actual past individual.  What's more, JFK really existed: he existed outside of people's minds.  He was never imaginary or purely fictional.  If you meditate carefully on these points you should be able to appreciate how dubious, if not preposterous, is the claim that only what exists now exists simpliciter.  The past is not nothing; the past was.

The case against presentism is strong.  In fact, I hold that presentism cannot be true. Must I then be an 'eternalist'?  Why? Both positions might be untenable. And this could be case even if they are logical contradictories.  We would then be up against an aporia in the strict sense. But I don't go that far now.

Consider the gladiatorial combats in Rome. They are a thing of the past.  That is a truism. They are no longer occurring. That too is a truism. But to say, with the presentist, that what no longer occurs is nothing at all, is not truistic but highly dubious if not preposterous.  Or will you tell me that the historians of ancient Rome have no subject matter?  On the other hand, the battles are not still going on, the besotted Romans drunk with blood lust are not still roaring, the gladiators are not still expiring in anguish.  So in what sense are the gladiators, their doings and sufferings actual?  How can anything wholly past be actual?  How can an event such as a beheading, whose mode of being is to occur, and thus elapse over time, occur tenselessly or timelessly?

This is but a sketch of the intricacies of the dialectic that envelops the presentist and the eternalist. The 'present' point is that common sense plays no role in deciding between them. In particular, and pace my friend Alan Rhoda, presentism cannot rightfully draw upon the support of common sense.

 

Saturday Night at the Oldies: 'In' Songs

Are you 'in' with the 'in crowd'?

Ramsey Lewis Trio, The 'In' Crowd

Dobie Gray, The 'In' Crowd

Glenn Miller, In the Mood

Beach Boys, In My Room

Beatles, In My Life

Suzi Quatro, Stumblin' In 

Bob Dylan, Blowin' in the Wind 

Kansas, Dust in the Wind

Bob Dylan, Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again

Bob Dylan, In My Time of Dyin'

Bob Dylan, Tangled Up in Blue

Five Satins, In the Still of the Night

Mungo Jerry, In the Summertime. That fabulous and far-off summer of 1970. I was unloading mail trucks at Terminal Annex, Los Angeles. 

Van Morrison, Into the Mystic

Fake it and Make it

 When we started out, did we know what we were doing? We do now.

A bit of posturing and pretense may be needed to launch a life. Posture and pretense become performance. The untested ideal becomes the verified real. At the start of a life scant is the evidence that you can do what you dream: you must believe beyond the evidence if you are to have a shot.

And so I beg to differ with W. K. Clifford:

For a couple of rather more technical treatments, see here.

The Long and the Short of It

The young, their lives ahead of them, think life is long; the old, their lives ending, know that it is short. Why knowledge in the second case? Because the old, some of them anyway, are surveyors of life and not mere livers of it.  This suggests that the old who lose themselves  in the quotidian round  may avoid the view from above and cultivate thereby a life-enhancing illusion.

Not filed under Sage Advice, but under Art of Life.

The Write-Off

I wrote him off at an early age but then never wrote him back on again.

Unjust! But then it is hard to be just even to oneself. And sometimes justice to self requires injustice towards others.  Such is our predicament in this dimly-lit slot canyon with unscalable walls and a flash flood coming, but you know not when.

Big Sur, Kerouac, and Being on the Edge

Dwight Green writes,

I had forgotten about your focus on the Beats in October (more of a remembrance of Kerouac, if I remember right) until I saw your recent post introducing it for this year. 

 

A couple of years ago I drove to the Big Sur area and was unable to do much hiking due to recent fire and weather wiping out many trails in the parks. On one of my stops I witnessed what helped push Kerouac mentally over the edge, as he published in Big Sur. The incredible power that defines the area is truly awesome (despite the overuse of that word). It's been a long time since I really connected with Kerouac but I did that weekend. See here.  (I'm in the process of moving this to a new site but I don't have all the links working yet, so this is the old site.) 

 

The incident is more than a little macabre and I don't mean to "profit" from it in any way, but I had not understood his feelings in Big Sur until that moment. Just wanted to pass it on in case it's of interest.

Yes, a remembrance of Kerouac, Memory Babe, by this acolyte of anamnesis. You are using 'awesome' correctly and so you can hardly be taxed with overuse.  Thanks for reminding me of the passage:

So that when later I heard people say “Oh Big Sur must be beautiful!” I gulp to wonder why it has the reputation of being beautiful above and beyond its fearfulness, its Blakean groaning roughrock Creation throes, those vistas when you drive the coast highway on a sunny day opening up the eye for miles of horrible washing sawing.  Jack Kerouac, Big Sur (1962)

I am a native Californian  who knows Jack's book and the coastal road and the bridge and the views and has had his own remarkable experiences at Big Sur.  Gazing out at the Pacific  nearly 50 years ago I felt as if locked into the same nunc stans that I had glimpsed a few months before at Playa del Rey on the southern California coast. 

 

Nature in the extremity of her beauty has the power to unhinge the soul from the door jambs of what passes for sanity.  Mystical glimpses of the Unseen and the Eternal come mainly to the young if they come at all, and some of the recipients of these gifts spend the rest of their lives trying to live up to their vouchsafings.

 

The unhinging I just spoke of can also take a dark and terrible form in this place of beauty and hazard:

. . . Big Sur follows Kerouac a few years after On the Road had been published (and fourteen years after the events in the book) as he's trying to handle the fame of his book as well as his inability to control himself, especially with alcohol. Kerouac's mental deterioration coincides with his visits to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's cabin in Big Sur. His isolation, exacerbated by the insignificance he feels in comparison to nature's power brings on a mental and physical breakdown. The poem he wrote while in Big Sur, "Sea: Sounds of the Pacific Ocean at Big Sur," echoes the parts of the novel comparing man's transience to nature's permanence, one of the many tensions in the book such as image vs. reality and beauty vs. hazard.

Worse still are the accidental deaths and the suicides.  You link to the story of the young man who fell into a blowhole and perished while inspecting a marine geyser. 

 

The 19-year-old son of an undergraduate philosophy professor of mine committed suicide by plunging from the bridge.  I remember him as a baby in a high chair in his mother's kitchen. We both wanted Ronda's attention. Little Charley was hungry for food, my young self for truth.  Mommy dutifully divided her attention, but little Charley won.

 

Addendum:  At the end of the above Memory Babe link you will find a number of good critical comments on Jack and on Nicosia's biography.

 

William Lane Craig . . .

. . . on the headwaters of the human race. A very intelligent article. I have had similar thoughts.  Here is an excerpt from an entry dated 30 August 2011:

But how can God create man in his image and likeness without interfering in the evolutionary processes which most of us believe are responsible for man's existence as an animal? As follows.

Man as an animal is one thing, man as a spiritual, rational, and moral being is another. The origin of man as an animal came about not through any special divine acts but through the evolutionary processes common to the origination of all animal species. But man as spirit, as a self-conscious, rational being who distinguishes between good and evil cannot be accounted for in naturalistic terms. (This can be argued with great rigor, but not now!)

As animals, we are descended from lower forms. As animals, we are part of the natural world and have the same general type of origin as any other animal species. Hence there was no Adam and Eve as first biological parents of the human race who came into existence directly by divine intervention without animal progenitors. But although we are animals, we are also spiritual beings, spiritual selves. I am an I, an ego, and this I-ness or egoity cannot be explained naturalistically. I am a person possessing free will and conscience neither of which can be explained naturalistically.

What 'Adam' refers to is not a man qua member of a zoological species, but the first man to become a spiritual self. This spiritual selfhood came into existence through a spiritual encounter with the divine self. In this I-Thou encounter, the divine self elicited or triggered man's latent spiritual self. This spiritual self did not  emerge naturally; what emerged naturally was the potentiality to hear a divine call which called man to his vocation, his higher destiny, namely, a sharing in the divine life. The divine call is from beyond the human horizon.

But in the encounter with the divine self which first triggered man's personhood or spiritual selfhood, there arose man's freedom and his sense of being a separate self, an ego distinct from God and from other egos. Thus was born pride and self-assertion and egotism. Sensing his quasi-divine status, man asserted himself against the One who had revealed himself, the One who simultaneously called him to a Higher Life but also imposed restrictions and made demands. Man in his pride then made a fateful choice, drunk with the sense of his own power: he decided to go it alone.

This rebellion was the Fall of man, which has nothing to do with a serpent or an apple or the being expelled from a physical garden located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Original Sin was a
spiritual event, and its transmission is not by semen, pace certain  Pauline passages, but by socio-cultural-linguistic means.

If we take some such tack as the above, then we can reconcile what we know to be true from natural science with the Biblical message.  Religion and science needn't compete; they can complement each other -- but only if each sticks to its own province. In this way we can avoid both the extremes of the fundamentalists and literalists and the extremes of the 'Dawkins gang' (Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Harris, et al.)

Our question was whether rejecting the literal truth of the Adam and Eve story entails rejecting the doctrine of the Fall.  The answer to this is in the negative since the mere possibility of an account such as the one  just given shows that the entailment fails.  Man's fallenness is a spiritual condition that can only be understood in a spiritual way.  It does not require that the whole human race have sprung from exactly two animal progenitors that miraculously came into physical existence by divine agency and thus without animal progenitors.  Nor does it require that the transmission of the fallen condition be biological in nature.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: More Messages, Letters, etc.

Marvelettes, Please Mr. Postman. 

Elvis Presley, Return to Sender

Joan Baez, Rock Salt and Nails. "The letters you wrote me were written in shame/And I know that your conscience still echoes my name."

Son House, Death Letter Blues

Elvis Presley, The U. S. Male

Larry Finnegan, Dear One. If you remember this one, I'll buy you a beer.

Hank Williams, Dear John. "That's all she wrote. I sent your saddle home."

Ricky Nelson, That's All She Wrote

Joe Cocker, The Letter

 

Ontologically Serious and Unserious Uses of 'Something' and the Problem of Reference to the Nonexistent

If Jane is friendly, then there is something Jane is, namely, friendly. But one hesitates to infer either

1) There is (exists) such an object as friendly

which is not even well-formed, or

1*) There is (exists) such an object as friendliness

which is well-formed but offensive to the nominalist sensibility. 'Jane is friendly' commits one to Jane but not obviously to the property of being friendly. 

According to Sainsbury and Tye (Seven Puzzles of Thought and How to Solve Them, Oxford UP, 2012, p. 114), "'There is something' is not an object quantifier" in sentences like 'There is something that Jane is, namely, friendly.' In such cases, 

The 'thing' in 'something' is not ontologically serious. By contrast, expressions like 'object' and 'entity are used in philosophical discourse  to mark ontological commitment; and words like 'dagger' and 'fountain of youth' are used by everyone in that way in extensional contexts. (ibid.)

The idea is that there are two senses/uses of 'something.' One is ontologically serious because ontologically committal while the other is not.  If I kick a ball, then there is  something I kick. (Ontologically committal use of 'something' in an extensional context.) If Macbeth hallucinated a dagger, then there is something Macbeth hallucinated, namely, a dagger. (Ontologically noncommittal use of 'something' in an intensional/intentional context.)

Do we have here the makings of a solution to the ancient problem of apparent reference to the nonexistent?  I don't think so. 

Go back to Jane. Jane is friendly.  So there is something she is, namely, friendly. So far, so good. Everything is clear. But trouble starts and murk intrudes when we are told that the 'something' in play here is ontologically noncommittal: there is nothing in reality that Jane is, or is related to in virtue of which she is friendly. Thus there is no property, friendliness, that she instantiates, or any property that she has as a constituent, or anything like that. In reality there is just Jane.  But then what is the difference between Jane's being friendly and her being unfriendly?

It is evident to me that there has to be something in reality that grounds that difference. If you deny this, I will not understand you. Suppose you say  that Jane's being friendly  is just the circumstance that someone attached or applied the predicate 'is friendly' to her.  I will say: So she needs to be called friendly to BE friendly? That is absurd.  If I called her unfriendly, would she then be unfriendly? What if I called her anorexic? IS she whatever I SAY she is? Has she no properties independently of my say-so? If no one called her anything, would she have no properties at all?  Before the evolution of languages was the Earth neither spheroid nor non-spheroid?  Is there no difference between a predicate's being true of an individual and its being applied to or predicated of an individual? 

These considerations convince me that the distinction between ontologically serious and  unserious uses of 'something' has not been established.  Note that it needs to be established independently of the Macbeth problem.  To first introduce it as a solution to the Macbeth problem would be ad hoc.

There is also this question: what is the difference between saying that there is something -- in the ontologically unserious sense -- that Macbeth hallucinated and saying that Macbeth hallucinated a Meinongian nonexistent object?  How does the Sainsbury and Tye solution differ from a Meinongian one?

BEATific October Again

It's October again, my favorite month, and Kerouac month in my personal literary liturgy.  And no better way to kick off Kerouac month than with 'sweet gone Jack'  reading from "October in Railroad Earth" from Lonesome Traveler, 1960.  Steve Allen provides the wonderful piano accompaniment.  I have the Grove Press Black Cat 1970 paperback edition. I bought it on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, 12 April 1973. I was travelling East by thumb to check out East Coast graduate schools where I had been accepted, but mostly  I 'rode the dog' (Greyhound bus), a mode of transport I wouldn't put up with today: two guys behind me chain-smoked  and talked all the way from Los Angeles to Phoenix.  New Orleans proved to be memorable, including the flophouse on Carondelet I stayed in for $2.  It was there that Lonesome  Traveler joined On the Road in my rucksack. 

I never before had seen Tabasco bottles so big as on the tables of the Bourbon Street bars and eateries.  Exulting in the beat quiddity of the scene, I couldn't help but share my enthusiasm for Nawlins with a lady of the evening, not sampling her wares, but just talking to her on the street, she thinking me naive, and I was. 

Here is a long  excerpt (7:10), which contains the whole of the first two sections of "October in Railroad Earth," pp. 37-40, of the Black Cat edition.

You don't know jack about Jack if you don't know that he was deeply conservative despite his excesses.  The aficionados will enjoy The Conservative Kerouac.

And a tip of the hat to old college buddy and Kerouac and jazz aficionado 'Monterey Tom' Coleman who will enjoy Jack and Frank.

Polarization and Flotation in Politics

Can we avoid both polarization and a noncommittal floating above the fray that does not commit to one side or the other? I fear not. Politics is war. You must take a side. You can't play the philosopher on the battlefield.  A warrior at war cannot be "a spectator of all time and existence," as noble as such spectatorship is.   A warrior who is fully human, however, will know when to put aside his weapons and take up his pen.  He will know that, in the end, "The pen is mightier than the sword." But only in the end. Now you are in the field. If you don't survive the fight, there will be no time left for 'penmanship.'

Opponents or Enemies?

If you shrink back from regarding your political opponents as enemies, you do not appreciate the threat they pose. You are not taking them seriously enough. They pose an existential threat. Such a threat is not merely a threat to one's physical existence; it is a threat to one's way of life, to one's cultural and spiritual traditions and heritage.   Human life is not merely biological.